Health insurance is now mandated! What next? Forced marriage after sex?

Republican Gov. Phil Scott very silently signed into law a bill that will include a penalty for those who don’t have insurance in Vermont. This mandate is scheduled to take effect in 2020, according to The Washington Times. Scott and the state’s largest private health insurance provider said that this mandate provides stability.

Days after this, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a similar law. Currently, a number of other states are considering this same mandate of an insurance requirement for its residents.

Who benefits most from this mandate?

Without a doubt, insurance companies will receive the most benefit from such a mandate. The only question is why state representatives are signing off on these types of requirements without the support, knowledge, or suggestion of the people that the law will affect the most?

Are we moving toward a government of dictatorship? When asked how they felt about such a move, residents stated that they did not want the federal government to dictate what they needed to buy. So this being the case, exactly what is going on here?

There are those who argue for the mandate

Over 52% of the people polled on Debate.org stated that they believe that the government should indeed mandate health insurance. The reasons that they provide include things like “it’s only fair because it helps those who can’t help themselves” or “it is necessary for the children that need medical attention, but their parents can’t afford it” and so on.

These arguments are primarily based on an emotional appeal and rarely fall in line with anything that assists in understanding how such a mandate will benefit the general population as a whole. It goes without saying that making health insurance a requirement will indeed assist the poor. The only problem is that one has to wonder exactly who will pay for the required health insurance when the poor can’t pay for it themselves. The money to cover this privilege has to come from somewhere.

There are those who are tired of taking care of the poor

Arguments against having a government required health insurance focus on middle-class individuals who are tired of paying higher taxes just to support those who can’t support themselves. If the government decided to make such requirements, then it would only be fair that they do so without penalizing a small sector of the population that is disappearing.

Funds are not being taken from a reserve within each state and used to cover such mandates, and the state is not given additional funds to ensure its residents are covered. Instead, the money comes from elevated taxes that middle-class individuals are forced to pay—all to ensure that those same funds are thrown into the deep pocket of the healthcare providers that lobbied to have such a law mandated in the first place. But someone will be left out in the cold with such a law. Will it be you?

About Audra L.

Audra L. is an author, columnist and community activist who's dedicated to finding truth through research and effective communication. She received her degree in Public Policy and teaches Community Development, Public Speaking and Communications Law to youth throughout the nation. She is the recipient of over 23 awards and honors for her commitment to community outreach initiatives.

20 comments

“Arguments against having a government required health insurance focus on middle-class individuals who are tired of paying higher taxes just to support those who can’t support themselves.” Isn’t that a big part of being a good person, and a good Christian, to help those who can’t help themselves?

Isn’t it a big part of being a good Christian and a good person to get off your dead a$$ and provide for yourself? The USA was founded on the principles of providing for yourself and asking for help when you needed it, not when you wanted to sponge off of the taxpayers. The fact that most liberals are no longer capable of caring for themselves due to majoring in african studies, social justice, and rioting in college and continue to live in their parent’s basement until they are 35 doesn’t mean they should be sponging off of me either. I really don’t mind that that the welfare queen hauls her brood of kids around in an old station wagon but it really irks me that now she’s got a new Escalade and sporting more gold on her body than the government has left in Ft. Knox. Oh, and by the way, I drive an old Dodge pickup and eat burgers and fries while she’s eating steak and a baked potato for dinner.
I’m a firm believer that anyone that goes onto welfare should be sterilized so they can’t create the next generation of takers. The best thing that could happen is any law that our supposed “representatives” create that steps outside of the Constitution, and these kinds of “laws” surely do, all of the money to foot the bill needs to come entirely out of their pockets, not mine.

If people want a free handout, then let the state drug test them. Give them a job: Sweep sidewalks, shovel side walks in the winter. Paint the Town: That is assist the elderly around their house and yards. Earn your way. Do not become a dead beat as so many do. Support me and I will do nothing!!

It seems that people who regard themselves as secular and atheists want to weight in on how Christians should conduct themselves. In most cases these days, being Christian is defined by others like yourself as being completely passive and subordinate to the will of secular society. I do not agree with your presumption.

Idon’t agree with you David because most of the people that are to sorry to work are the ones that we have to support, and most of them are from other countries and should not be here in America anyway.

No, it is not Christian to support the lazy ones. In fact is anti Christian to do so. The Bible says that those who don’t work shall not eat either, and it demands the people to work so they can take care of their families, and help the needy not the lazy or the crooks. Work was ordained by God from the beginnings as it says in Genesis!

In general, if you help me directly or I get help from the YMCA or a church, I feel grateful. If I get anything from the government, I eventually feel entitled to it. And I don’t care that others have to pay for it.

If you help me directly or voluntarily donate to the local food bank or your church humanitarian fund or any other charitable cause, you feel good about it, mostly because it was YOUR CHOICE.

It is not the governments job to provide “charity.” It isn’t even charity to give someone money (or services) you took from others by force.

I believe you may have misunderstood Duane’s comment. He actually is saying he is on your side. I believe in this case, he is using a little sarcasm to get his point across.

However I agree to put into law that we have to support the insurance others are obviously now “forced” to have is just going to be paid by hard working tax payers and the only people going to benefit from that is the insurance companies.

Government should not be in the business of forcing people to have insurance.

As a nurse, I can tell you that we are already paying for the “unreqired” health care of these people. They come into the hospital, smoking a pack a day, with their new iphones, $80 manicures, highlighted hair, talking about Game of Thrones they watch on HBO – and tell you they can’t afford insurance. Or at least until recently, you have those who game the system. They purchase health insurance for a condition or procedure they knew well in advance they would need, pay their several months of premiums, get hundreds of thousands of dollars of care for a pittance and once it’s done – they drop the insurance until the next time. So to those folks who think their luxuries are far more important than doing the responsible and attempting to protect themselves- this will come as a shock. For the rest of us, thank god the government is going to enforce some of this!! And there will be some who will still show up at the ER for every sniffle, ache or sneeze. We have to treat them, and don’t ask for any money up front, and they will continue to rely on the system to pay their way on the backs of the working class.

Well said throughout the article and comments. A point missed here though is the fundamental problem with healthcare today…and that is the very high cost of care that goes along with high tech medicine and therapies. Insurance is a pool of risk and the only way insurance works is if more people pay into it than actually need it. While on the surface I don’t like the idea, creating penalties for not having insurance is not meant to overburden taxpayers but – in some part – to get those at younger ages, where the insurance is less needed, to pay their fair share. That’s how these things work. If folks just paid for insurance when they needed it or when they wanted to, the system would not work….or premiums would be much higher.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know and understand that even though ‘health insurance’ might be a good idea, it is not the place of the government to require it. As citizens, we are losing more and more of the ability to make our own decisions. I believe it is time to reign in the totalitarian state.

Employers used to provide health insurance for their workers, only large companies do so anymore, if you are self-employed you’re on your own and have to struggle to afford insurance because the insurance companies won’t sell you group rates, individual policies are much more expensive. Most job have no insurance so what are people supposed to do? The middle class is shrinking and therefore there are more people living paycheck to paycheck. They work! They don’t want a hand out they want affordable health care! I don’t get the comment that the middle class is having to pay for others health care. If employers provided it there wouldn’t be a problem. This is why the government must step in to help. Otherwise people go to the ER for care, way too expensive and the wrong way to provide health care. There is no preventive care so people are sicker when they finally see a doctor. We must have Medicare for All so our country can be strong and our citizens healthy for the reasons I’ve just mentioned.

Government control or corporate control – what’s the difference. Why are “conservative Christians” so obsessed with railing against government and relatively silent on how the rich have dominated the government and our nation in the interest of greed and profit? Who will pay the insurance bill for those without insurance when they get sick? Taxpayers. I am opposed to the mandate and we need a different solution. But to go from the mandate to forced marriage is a stretch. A corporate tax should pay for that expense since they profit the most from the current health care system

What’s necessary is single-payer health insurance, or Medicaid/Medicare for all.

I would far rather have the government, aka We the people, involved in my health insurance than to be at the mercy of for-profit corporations. You can vote politicians out of office. Not corporate CEOs.

As for the argument that the middle class gets stuck paying the taxes, that happens in circumstances like the present, in which the ultra-wealthy get Very Special Tax Breaks and the rest of us have to make up for the lost revenue. So bring back progressive taxation, like we had during Eisenhower’s presidency.

Sad though I’d feel for all those hard-working kleptocrats, weary from their unceasing labors of sending our jobs overseas, bankrupting American companies, and floating away on their golden parachutes…

Dear Conservative Mom: With all due respect, your article title equating forced marriage after sex with mandatory health insurance was both a false equivalence and gratuitous. Health insurance is a very serious issue in America and for millions of Americans, it is either unavailable or unaffordable. It is also false to suggest that a mandate would force us to pay for something that we are not already paying for. We all pay, directly or indirectly, for every dollar of health care provided in America – through policy premiums, but also tax dollars spent on governmental health programs, private donations to health care organizations and – more importantly – through higher costs of health care that we all pay due the requirement that health care organizations must provide certain health care regardless of ability to pay. A mandate would not necessarily increase the total cost of health care, but it would reallocate who pays for it.

Frankly, however, whether we keep what we have or move to a mandated health insurance system may be little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if we don’t do something to reduce the growth of health care costs. Insurance companies, health care providers and drug companies have a vested interest in maintaining the growth in health care costs and have been greatly enabled by a Congress dependent on the fund raising dollars that these companies provide. Unless or until Congress decides to do something that benefits their voters and not their donors, no amount of movement in the health insurance deck chairs is likely to make much difference.

I am also disturbed by comments that undervalue aid to people who can’t afford health insurance. In purely self serving economic terms, every day of labor lost by a person too ill to work is a loss of productivity and tax revenue that in the end, is a loss by all of us. If we seriously want to grow GDP in this country, then we need everyone healthy and able to work, earning an income on which they pay taxes and use to buy goods and services that support others.